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Mr. D’Amours. My time has expired. Mr. Forsythe? 
Mr. ForsyTHE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
Thank you, Ken, for your testimony. 
This is a question actually which John Breaux, who could not be 
here, wanted to ask you. This morning Mayor Koch disputed that 
portion of your testimony which he had apparently read regarding 
the availability of 295 barren areas comprising 54,000 acres within 
100 miles of the Statue of Liberty which might be suitable for the 
disposal of New York Harbor dredged material. Mr. Kamlet, do you 
stand by the figures in your testimony or do you have any com- 
ments on what Mr. Koch said? 
Mr. KAMLET. Yes to both. The figures that I was citing were fig- 
ures that were generated by contractors to the New York District 
of the Corps of Engineers, the Mitre Corp., I believe, specifically. 
These are sites that they have identified in a series of two reports 
that they prepared for the Corps. Of the 200-some-odd sites that 
they evaluated, they subsequently looked at 11 of them in detail. 
Of the 11, they were only able to reject 1 of the 11 as probably in- 
appropriate for dredge material disposal. 
- Yes, I stand by those numbers. I think they are accurate. It is 
noteworthy that the Commissioner of the New York City Depart- 
ment of Ports and Terminals stated that, as far as she was con- 
cerned, there was no difference in terms of sites that were suitable 
for dredged material disposal and sites that could accommodate 
sewage sludge. Therefore, I gather from that that these sites might 
be available for sewage sludge application as well. 
Mr. ForsyTHE. I think I may disagree with your last statement 
regarding finding sites available for sewage application. Maybe 
they are there. Maybe they might be suitable under certain circum- 
stances. However, as I understand it, finding a place on land for 
the disposal of sewage sludge is getting to be very, very difficult. 
Some local ordinances and local pressures bring about all kinds of 
problems which are very difficult to overcome. Then when it comes 
to a very sensitive aquifer, I have even greater problems. You 
heard me talk about that this morning. 
Mr. KAMLET. Yes, sir. I might say, Mr. Forsythe, that in none of 
these sites are the groundwater conditions such that that would be 
a problem. That was one of the screening criteria utilized in identi- 
fying these sites, so that none of these areas that I alluded to 
would be ones with a high water table close to the surface. 
Mr. ForsyTHE. First, we will have some additional questions 
which we would like to have you answer for the record instead of 
trying to get them all in this afternoon. 
Do you favor balancing human health and environmental im- 
pacts of ocean dumping against the human health and environmen- 
tal impacts of land-based disposal methods as currently required 
under the Ocean Dumping Act and under the Sofaer decision? 
Mr. KAM kT. As I have indicated, Mr. Forsythe, I think there are 
a lot of problems with the Sofaer decision, not the least of which 
was the fact that the decision did not reflect at all the considerable 
relevance of the London Dumping Convention’s requirements on 
the regulatory situation. Under the London Dumping Convention, 
not only is EPA, the United States as a government, not required 
